Imaginings of place

The place I have chosen is coastal chennai. The very construction of different parts of an extended coastline as a place is my own conceptualization. This is also echoed by environmental activists who see the coast as a particular type of ecological place where sand dunes, sea-water and fresh water exist in relation to one another. In their campaigns they show an understanding of the coast as a connected ecological zone, although it has distinct features at different points of the shoreline. For fishers who live and fish in the Bay of Bengal, the coast is not uniform everywhere. Rather, they see particularities in how the coast is materialized in each location. One common way in which they narrate the boundaries of place is to talk about the coast as carved into caste-based locations where different caste groups reside. The coast is thus a collection of caste-locations where different sets of fishers live. In places like Ennore which have lived with industrial infrastructure for over 20 years, the coast is hyper-localized and defined according to the specific materialities of the infrastructure at different parts of the shoreline. For instance, at the mouth of the estuary, erosion and accretion has changed the shoreline rapidly. Further south of the estuary, coastal residents who live next to a fertilizer company see the coast as shaped by pollutants that seep into groundwater. Industrial infrastructures shape the materialities of how the coast can be understood as place. Among fishers, those who fish for a living also explain the coast in relation to the forms of the sea-bed and the nature of the waves at different regions of the coast. Norther parts of the chennai coast is characterized by rough waves and the sea-bed is sandy, whereas the southern parts have a more marshy sea-bed.